Re: [Vserver] A possible new idea

From: Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd_at_firmix.at>
Date: Thu 11 May 2006 - 09:18:05 BST
Message-Id: <1147335485.2348.48.camel@tara.firmix.at>

Risking to get off-topic:

On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 23:20 -0400, Stephen Harris wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 12:35:38AM +0200, Herbert Poetzl wrote:
> > why would somebody want to _share_ the host files with
> > the guest, instead of having a separate filesystem for
> > them?
>
> This is actually how Solaris 10 zones work. In a Solaris 10
> zone the filesystems /usr /bin /lib and so on are read-only loop-back
> mounts to the host OS. It makes the guest a lot smaller as a result.
> Pretty much most of the overhead of a guest ("zone" in Solaris terms)
> is the local files in writeable filesystems to ensure OS stability
> (eg /var/sadm for package maintenance).
>
> You don't have to worry about patching each guest because each guest
> is using the host OS; patch the host, reboot the guest and it's
> automatically patched. Yes, this requires native OS support (eg the
> patch utilities need to know that a guest exists and so updates it's
> package state files; the patch _contents_ would appear automatically as
> a result of the loopback mounts; it's merely the package state files that
> need updating).

On Solaris not even that is necessary - the package mgmt tools can
handle the "update" of already updated files (e.g. on read-only mounted
NFS-volumes) since ages cleanly.

        Bernd

-- 
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